Police Recount Kidder’s Ordeal on the Streets

Actress Margot Kidder wandered for three days across Los Angeles, often apparently on foot and aided by good Samaritans who took the co-star of the “Superman” films for a homeless woman, according to a reconstruction of Kidder’s erratic odyssey put together Thursday by Glendale police.

Piecing together at least a dozen accounts from those who met her on the way--airport security guards, taxi drivers and others--police retraced Kidder’s journey from Los Angeles International Airport to a refuge in the bushes behind a home in Glendale.

She was discovered there Tuesday--dazed and dirty, her hair hacked off, dressed in a transient’s borrowed clothes--by police who took her to the psychiatric ward of the county’s Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar. She was transferred Wednesday to an undisclosed private psychiatric clinic, police said.

The journey began when Kidder, best known as Lois Lane in the “Superman” movies, showed up at LAX on Saturday night--a day early--for a scheduled flight to Phoenix.

Police believe she covered miles--taking taxis some of the way and walking much of the rest. She was driven the last leg of her journey--from Atwater to Glendale--by three people who befriended her when she approached them on the street late Monday and asked for a cigarette, police said.

Thinking the tired-looking actress was a homeless woman, the three put her up at a Glendale motel for the night after trying unsuccessfully to get her admitted to a shelter for the homeless, one of them said.

“She said her name was Elizabeth and she was really paranoid about not having anyone know where she was,” said Robert Giannini, 28, a Tujunga car salesman who said he paid $33 for Kidder’s room at the Bell Motor Motel.

“She said she had been walking for three days from L.A.,” he said. Kidder told him that someone “had some thugs after her and they beat her up, and that she had been sleeping in bushes,” he said.

Giannini said that even though he doubted the woman’s account--she showed no visible signs of being beaten, he said--she could barely stand and was clearly in need of assistance.

Dressed in a red sweatshirt and dirty blue pants, she was missing some teeth--police said later that she misplaced her dental plate--and her haphazardly cut hair was tied with a strip from a plastic grocery bag, Giannini said.

“She said she was trying to disguise herself,” he said.

Glendale police Sgt. Rick Young said Thursday that detectives had suspended their investigation of Kidder’s claim that someone assaulted her near LAX because “everything we have now does not show she was attacked.”

The Canadian-born actress twice refused to meet with the investigators looking into her story, he said.

According to the partial account the police gave, Kidder was scheduled to fly to Phoenix on Sunday en route to an assignment teaching acting at Eastern Arizona College in Thatcher, but for some reason arrived at LAX late Saturday night. Airport security guards have told the police she remained there until 3:30 or 4 a.m. Sunday.

For much of Sunday and Monday, she simply wandered until she ran into Giannini and his friends outside a church in Atwater about 9:30 Monday night and asked for a cigarette. “She asked if she could sleep on my living room floor, but I didn’t think that was a very good idea,” Giannini said.

He said that after the fruitless search for a shelter that would take her, he decided to buy the woman a cheap motel room because “I couldn’t just leave her.”

Giannini said he and his two friends bought Kidder beef jerky and orange juice and gave her some spare change so she could call homeless shelters the next day. The motel’s manager, James Rauch, said Kidder borrowed a pair of scissors, which she apparently used to cut off more of her hair.

Young said Kidder spent most of Tuesday walking through Glendale.